This weekend, Working Families Party Executive Director Dan Cantor and Friends of Democracy Founder Jonathan Soros appear together for an interview with Bill Moyers on Moyers and Company. The topic: what's wrong with big-money politics --and what we can d

Sunday February 17, 2013, 4:43 pm
in all likelihood it will take more than "kicking butt against the money glutt"- but generally a good project, there should be many more also promoting the OTHER THIRD PARTIES !

Sunday February 17, 2013, 9:02 pm
There are two well-established solutions.

The first, certainly workable in the U.S., is to get voters to contribute voluntarily. Candidates don't want to have to take money from PACs, aside from the ones which they genuinely support. When they do that, they have to pay those PACs back, or never receive such funding again, and they usually don't want to do that. If you contribute $5 to your favourite candidate, then that's $5 less that the candidate needs to seek from PACs. They want their hands free.

The other is a public per-vote subsidy. We have that in Canada. If I recall correctly, each vote which a party receives gets that party $2 from the government. This has a few benefits: First, all parties are encouraged to seek support everywhere, even in places where they stand no chance of victory, and that can do wonders for national unity and oppose polarization. Second, parties do not need to seek nearly as much money from PACs whose interests they do not already support. The other nice part of this is that parties only need to cater to a "weak base", just enough to get people to the polls, rather than need a "hard base" of industries, special interest groups, and other major donors, which would keep them from getting too ideological (rather than pragmatic and practical), unless a large portion of the population really wants candidates who stand on principle.